The Unification Chronicles

27: Some­thing Old, Some­thing Older

Daniel looked into the alcove. It held two small altars, each carved from a sin­gle block of black stone. On one altar was a scroll cas­ing. On the other was a bronze hel­met. Both looked very, very old.

“The scroll,” Moham­mad said, “tells the story of the great war of the angels, the fall of Lucifer and how the angels and demons came to walk among us. It is writ­ten in ancient Baby­lon­ian, and accord­ing to myth is only a trans­la­tion of a far older work handed down in clay tablets, which itself was tran­scribed from oral tra­di­tions. No one knows how old the story really is.”

“And the hel­met?” Daniel asked.

“It is one of the few remain­ing angelic arti­facts. It is the hel­met of an angel killed in the great war.”

Daniel was trans­fixed by the hel­met. It looked bronze only at first. The more he looked at it, the more trou­ble he had in deter­min­ing what metal it was actu­ally made of. The color was a dark gray-​​green, mot­tled with age. “May I exam­ine it?”

“They are both yours now, Daniel Cho. By order of the archangel.”

Daniel picked up the hel­met. It was heav­ier than he expected. He looked inside, and imme­di­ately saw why. Not only were the walls of the hel­met thicker than usual, but the hel­met was padded with some kind of poly­mer. As he turned it in the light, he saw… No, that was impossible.

“Susan, bring your cam­era over here. Does that thing have zoom?”

“Sure.” She aimed where he directed.

“Zoom in on that. What do you see?”

“It looks like a cir­cuit board,” she said. “Like the moth­er­board on my laptop.”

Micro­cir­cuitry, Daniel thought. In an ancient angelic hel­met. How much had Uriel not told them?

“Okay,” he said, “stand back.”

“Whoa, there, sport,” Jeff said. “What do you have in mind? You’ve got that look on your face.”

[make sure we hear the story of Jeff’s wife and his search for her mur­derer ear­lier in the story, so it informs Daniel’s sense of vengeance later]

“I’m just going to try it on,” Daniel said. “It’s a cou­ple dozen cen­turies old, right? My lap­top bat­tery doesn’t last four hours.”

“I don’t think this is such a good idea, Danny.”

“Jeff, we need to know every­thing we can about these things, right? And besides, would Uriel have sent us after this if it was dangerous?”

“Prob­a­bly no worse,” Jeff said, “than the Holy Grail, the golden fleece, Prometheus’s fire…”

Daniel looked at Susan. “You get­ting this?” She nod­ded, keep­ing the cam­era on him.

“Okay,” he said. He looked down at the hel­met again, raised it up and put it on his head.

As soon as it was steady, he heard a soft “thwup” sound and felt some­thing soft close around his throat. The sounds of the room faded instantly to noth­ing, only to come back up slightly dif­fer­ent, like they were being run through a dig­i­tal fil­ter. The eye holes went black, and then faded back to trans­parency. Super­im­posed over his field of vision, Daniel could see var­i­ous read­outs float­ing in the air around him. The char­ac­ters were for­eign to him, but they look old, like the Sumer­ian or Baby­lon­ian writ­ing he’d seen in muse­ums. Despite the seal around his neck, he found he could breathe nor­mally, although the dusty smell of the room was com­pletely gone. The air was clean and cooler than the room air on his body.

“Daniel?” Susan said. Her eyes were huge.

“What do you see?” he asked.

She jumped at the sound of his voice. “The — the eye holes are black and have a matte fin­ish, like you have black stones in there. You can see?”

“I can see fine,” he said. He decided not to try to explain the heads up dis­play yet. “What else?”

“Your voice is loud, like a bull­horn. It’s been processed, too, sounds deeper than normal.”

Daniel chuck­led. “The voice of God,” he said.

“I wouldn’t call it that,” Susan said, “but that’s the effect.”

Daniel turned his head and looked at Jeff. He saw that the Mul­lah behind Jeff was pray­ing to him­self. “Well,” he said, “they clearly have bet­ter bat­tery tech­nol­ogy than Dell.”

“You’re a riot, Danny. Now take that blasted thing off.”

Daniel reached up and put his palm to either side of the hel­met and tried to lift it off. It didn’t budge so much as a mil­lime­ter. “Uh oh,” he said.

“It doesn’t come off?” Susan said. “How are you going to eat?”

For that mat­ter, Daniel thought, what hap­pens if the power gives out and the air fil­tra­tion stops work­ing? He was about to sug­gest she give it a shot when they heard a loud bang from above. Dust rained down from between the stones in the ceiling.

The mul­lah reached into his robes and pulled out a pis­tol. “You will wait here,” he said, and stepped out the door, clos­ing it behind him. Jeff ran up to the door and tried the knob.

“It’s locked,” he said.

#

Dante Hicks shut down his PC and pre­pared to leave the office. It was early after­noon, but there was no one around to miss him. The rest of the office had either already left early to get a head start on the week­end, or they were already on vaca­tion. June was quiet month in fed­eral ser­vice, or at least it was sup­posed to be.

He slung his lap­top bag over his shoul­der and walked past the ele­va­tor to the stair­well. He’d been try­ing to get in shape for a while, and given the recent events with Agent Har­ris he fig­ured now was as good a time as any. Some pretty weird shit was going on, and he wanted to be ready for it.

Actu­ally, Dante had been dream­ing about some­thing like this for… well, pretty much his whole life. He always thought his life would be cool, like the stuff he grew up watch­ing on TV. But when he grad­u­ated from MIT and thumbed his nose at sev­eral cor­po­rate job offers to get a job with the FBI, he found it couldn’t be more unlike the X-​​Files. Hell, it wasn’t even as excit­ing as Bar­ney Miller. At least until this week.

Now, he was at ground zero of some­thing big. Some­thing he didn’t have to embell­ish over beers with Ran­dall. In fact, he hadn’t even told Ran­dall about the nanites. Those were the weird­est of the weird, and he wanted to puz­zle it out him­self a lit­tle more.

As he walked down the stair­well to the bio­labs, he thought he heard a weird echo of his foot­steps. It stopped when he stopped, so he wasn’t being fol­lowed, but it sounded… different.

I’m prob­a­bly just para­noid, he thought. All this stuff is get­ting to me.

He exited the stair­well and rounded the cor­ner to the labs. He badged in and saw that Shel­don, the lab tech he’d given the blood sam­ple to, was the only one on duty here as well. Noth­ing cleared out like DC on a beau­ti­ful sum­mer day, he thought.

“Mis­ter Cooper!” Dante said. “How’s it hanging?”

“The answer will require fur­ther exper­i­men­ta­tion to ver­ify repeat­able results,” Shel­don said. Dante felt a wave of depres­sion. Not only did he get the joke, he rec­og­nized that it was a joke. He needed to hang out with non-​​geeks more often.

“Are you like­wise seek­ing to escape the sink­ing ves­sel?” Shel­don asked.

“Uh…”

“I refer to our roden­tine cowork­ers, and their efforts to leave the build­ing as though it were a ship at sea tak­ing on water.”

“Gotcha. Actu­ally, I’m on my way out. I was won­der­ing if you’d dis­cov­ered any more about that blood sample.”

“You mean apart from the fact that it con­tains nan­otech­nol­ogy far in advance of any­thing com­mer­cially repro­ducible today? Or per­haps apart from how each nanite appears to derive power from no dis­cern­able source. I’m afraid I haven’t had much time to look into the mat­ter, as I’ve got sev­eral dozen algae blooms to cultivate.”

Damn, Dante thought. “Really?”

“Of course not, you fool. I was employ­ing sar­casm. I’ve been spend­ing every wak­ing moment in a thus far futile attempt to dis­cern the work­ings of the nanites. I swear, you Comp­Sci types can’t take a joke.”

“That’s, uh, great, Shel­don, but what else have you found?”

Shel­don walked around a lab table, motion­ing for Dante to fol­low him. Dante was again struck by how the bio­chemist moved with short, pre­cise motions, like a bird. “I put the blood into a growth cul­ture,” Shel­don said. “Tried to grow it like any other cel­lu­lar material.”

“And?”

“It reacted accord­ingly to the growth matrix,” Shel­don said. “But as the red blood cells increased in num­ber, so did the num­ber of nanites.”

“Really?” Dante asked. “Where did they come from?”

“The luminif­er­ous ether, Dante,” Shel­don said, sound­ing annoyed.

“What’s a luminescent — “

“The either,” Shel­don said, “the back­ground medium in which New­ton thought all mat­ter existed. It was another sar­cas­tic remark. I can see I’m going to have to dumb things down a lit­tle with you. Engi­neers.” He har­rumphed and con­tin­ued. “The nanites are capa­ble of repro­duc­ing on their own. It’s impos­si­ble to tell exactly how with­out greatly increased mag­ni­fi­ca­tion, but it’s clear that they are capa­ble of draw­ing car­bon atoms out of their envi­ron­ment and build­ing new ver­sions of them­selves, estab­lish­ing an effec­tively unlim­ited supply.”

“So if you had these in your blood…” Dante said.

“You would not only be effec­tively immor­tal, but the mech­a­nism by which you became immor­tal would be in and of itself inex­haustible. You’d live for­ever. Or at least until the sun goes red giant, at which point — “

“And you said the nanites had no effect in other blood samples?”

“None at all. I don’t know how such sim­ple machines could store such pro­gram­ming, much less process and exe­cute it, but they have no reac­tion to cells that don’t con­tain the DNA of the orig­i­nal sam­ple. Ponce De Leon would have found this dis­cov­ery intensely frustrating.”

“The means to eter­nal life, but it’s not trans­ferrable,” Dante said.

“Pre­cisely.”

Behind them, Dante heard a sin­gle pair of hands clapping.

He turned around and saw two men in expen­sive suits stand­ing at the entry to the lab. He hadn’t heard them badge in. One of them was clap­ping, slowly. The other was clos­ing the blinds over the one win­dow into the lab.

“Who are you peo­ple?” Shel­don demanded. Dante knew the tech didn’t appre­ci­ate peo­ple intrud­ing on his territory.

“I would think,” the clap­ping man said as he stepped for­ward and stopped the applause, “that you’d be happy to see us.” The man’s accent was faint, and Dante couldn’t tell if it was British or Australian.

“And why would I be happy to have you intrude on my lab?”

“You are study­ing the blood of immor­tals,” the man said. The other man qui­etly moved to the other end of the lab, and Dante noticed that just like that, he and Shel­don were pinned in. No way to get past the men other than going through heavy lab equipment.

“I’m sorry,” Dante said before Shel­don could reply. “You must have us con­fused with some­one else. I was just ask­ing my friend here about some gun­shot residue.”

“No you weren’t,” Shel­don said. “I would never stood to run­ning GSR tests.”

“Shut up, Shel­don,” Dante said, as qui­etly as he could.

“Get out of my lab!” Shel­don said. “Do not make me call security!”

The man smiled. “You won’t call secu­rity on us. For one thing, that would imply that the secu­rity guards were still alive.”

The other man, the one that hadn’t spo­ken, pulled some­thing out of his suit jacket. It was a small dig­i­tal cam­era. Dante thought it was prob­a­bly sim­i­lar to the ones Richard­son had used to record her videos. He started film­ing them, being sure to get him, Dante and the other demon in the shot.

Demon. Dante knew what they were now. He could see it in the way they moved, a grace­ful econ­omy of motion borne of cen­turies of prac­tice. The one who had spo­ken reached out, took a grad­u­ated cylin­der and smashed the end of it against the lab table.

“That is expen­sive lab­o­ra­tory equip­ment!” Shel­don said. “I’m going to see that you pay for that!” The poor guy still had no idea what was really going on.

The end of the cylin­der was now a jagged point, a more expen­sive but no less lethal ver­sion of a bro­ken beer bot­tle. The demon held it out in front him.

“Please,” he said, “resist. It will make this take longer.”

#

Jack jumped through the hole in the side of the mosque blown open by the demons. He had a flamethrower from the Humvee, and a ban­dolier full of grenades. He knew nei­ther would do much against the demons long term, but he should be able to do enough dam­age to slow them down. Hope­fully enough to extract Daniel, Jeff and Susan and get the fuck out of there.

Sandy and his men jumped through behind him, sim­i­larly armed. Sandy had an RPG that might pack enough punch to kill one of the bas­tards, though Jack wasn’t sure. Batarel had a grenade shoved down his pants and was on their asses the next day.

The inte­rior of the mosque was a study in high end destruc­tion. The demo­li­tion guys knew their busi­ness, and Jack sup­posed that fit. They’d prob­a­bly been prac­tic­ing since the inven­tion of black pow­der. The upside was that they left a pretty clear trail behind them. The hole in the wall opened into a smaller tem­ple, and with another explo­sion on the other side into the main hall. Jack saw bread­crumbs made of dust, shards of mar­ble, and ash lead­ing down a side cor­ri­dor. He sup­posed when you were immor­tal, you didn’t have to wait for the blast to clear.

“Come on!” he shouted to Sandy and his men, and ran down the cor­ri­dor after the demons.

#

Dante grabbed a Bun­sen burner, turned it on, and threw it at the demon. It caught on the feed tube and fell to the floor less than half way to him.

“Impres­sive,” the demon said. Great, Dante thought. Not only is he going to kill me, he’s going to stop to make fun of me first. Why don’t we just go back to high school gym class and get it over with?

“There’s, uh, more where that came from,” Dante said.

“I’m sure there is,” the demon said.

“Why are you doing this?” Shel­don screamed. Poor guy was still look­ing for logic.

“We’re clean­ing up a mess,” the other demon said, behind Dante and Shel­don. “Batarel was an idiot, and let this get out of hand. So it falls to us to clean up the loose ends.”

“I won’t tell any­one!” Shel­don said.

“You already have,” the sec­ond demon said. “Which is why you have to die.”

Shel­don started to sob, but Dante wasn’t fin­ished. He went over every­thing he knew about these guys in his head. They were just as human as he was, apart from the nan­otech­nol­ogy that kept them eter­nally healthy. They bled. They could be killed, if he could do enough damage.

He broke out his best William Shat­ner impres­sion, com­plete with hand ges­tures. “Look,” he said as he sur­rep­ti­tiously pulled of the rub­ber hose from the gas noz­zle the Bun­sen burner was attached to, “there has to be,” wav­ing his other hand like a mad star­ship cap­tain, “a way,” grab­bing the igniter with his other hand, “we can make a deal.”

“That’s the worst Cap­tain Kirk I’ve ever seen,” Shel­don said.

The demon stepped for­ward again, forc­ing Dante to retreat, then calmly reached over and turned off the gas. “Your kind is trou­ble, Mis­ter Hicks. You’re too clever for your own good. Curios­ity killed the cat.”

“Actu­ally,” Dante said, “I’m pretty lazy. You know, the early bird may get the worm, but the sec­ond mouse gets the cheese.” He was bab­bling now, say­ing any­thing he could to stall them. Give him time to think of something.

“I think we’re done with the chit chat,” the demon said. “It’s time to end this.” The demon took another step for­ward, and his head exploded with a sharp crack.

“Agh!” Shel­don screamed behind Dante. “Another one!”

Dante turned and saw a blond man stand­ing at the door to the lab with a hunt­ing rifle. He looked vaguely familiar.

The remain­ing demon actu­ally hissed at the new­comer. “Back off, Uriel! This is none of your concern!”

Uriel? The angel Jack had talked to? He’d seen him, briefly, on one of Richardson’s videos. Dante looked down and saw the first demon’s head reassem­bling itself. Damn, that’s unnerv­ing, he thought.

“Step away from the humans, Zagiel,” Uriel said, walk­ing into the room and keep­ing the rifle trained on the stand­ing demon. “They are under my protection.”

The demon, Zagiel, stepped away from them, towards Uriel. “You should not inter­fere in our deal­ings, angel.”

Uriel smiled. “The rules are chang­ing, Zagiel. I would think demons above all would embrace change.” He fired, and the bul­let struck Zagiel in the chest, knock­ing him back.

“Come on,” Uriel said to Dante and Shel­don. “We need to get you some­where safe.”

“Safe?” Shel­don screamed. “We’re in the Hoover Building!”

“Yeah,” Dante said, hop­ping over a table towards the angel. “And so are they.”

He looked back to see Zagiel pulling him­self back to his feet, and the other demon also try­ing to stand, head mostly recon­structed and hair grow­ing back out at a vis­i­ble speed. Spooky.

“Oh, very well,” Shel­don said, and scram­bled to fol­low them.

“Get behind me,” Uriel said, back­ing to the door­way. As Dante ran past, he saw the angel pull a grenade out of a pocket and pull the pin. Dante thought of all the gas pipes in that room. Aw, shit, he thought.

As soon as he and Shel­don were in the hall­way, he tack­led the bio­chemist to the ground.

“What the deuce?” Shel­don had time to say before Dante felt the angel fall on top of them and the room went up.